Here is a Familiar Idea

Universities Urged to Focus More on Social Doctrine
Advice From Conference Convoked by the Vatican

VATICAN CITY, NOV. 20, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Catholic universities must pay more attention in all their disciplines to the Church's social doctrine, recommended participants at an international conference convoked by the Holy See.

Such attention to social doctrine would allow the Gospel to penetrate deeper in the social fiber, in order to defend and promote human dignity, the common good, solidarity, and justice and peace, they stated last Friday, the first day of the conference.

The conference, entitled "University and Social Doctrine," was being attended by about 150 representatives of Catholic schools worldwide. It was held in a hotel in Rome and sponsored by the Congregation for Catholic Education and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

In the opening address, Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, urged that Catholic universities pay more attention to social doctrine as the basis for the common promotion of an integral and solidaristic humanism.

The cardinal said that in this way "the light of the Gospel, which is at the same time light of charity and intelligence," can make fruitful "human learning and, in the legitimate autonomy of the methods and languages and without ever losing sight of the necessary unity of learning, also animate the building of a social coexistence of justice and peace."

For his part, Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, stressed that the social doctrine of the Church should not be taught as an isolated subject, but should penetrate the various subjects imparted by Catholic universities.

In his intervention, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the Pope's vicar for Rome, said that recognition of the dignity of the human person needs "above all a push from the world of Christianity, which regards every one with a human face as possessing that dignity and destiny of the human being, creature in the image and likeness of God." .....

  [Mark here] An excerpt from today's ZENIT. I have always argued that CST provides  crucial  concepts, analytical categories and vocabulary for Catholic thinking about law, the teaching of law and legal scholarship. The notion of a "pervasive CST" in the law school curriculum is an intriguing one. Anyone ready to start a new "CST Law School"? Now, don't jump on me because I'm neglecting Aquinas, Augustine, von Balthazar, nouvelle theologie or moral theology in general. All of that's relevant, and would have an important place -- BUT, CST is a kind of applied social theology  -- and wouldn't that provide a particularly fruitful basis on which to organize a law school curriculum?

--Mark